RETURN OF THE CHEYENNE KID

Sharp shooting

Local filmmaker resurrects the Western

Film lovers the world over mourn the demise of the Western, that fabled genre now virtually ignored by Hollywood.  It's rebirth could be coming, however-from right here in Charlottesville.

            David Stewart, the head of David Stewart Productions, based in town, and Mitch Toney, a fellow moviemaker Stewart met at a film festival, have just completed a collaboration on The Return of the Cheyenne Kid.

            The family-oriented Western focuses on the adventures of Lash Davis, a.k.a. the Cheyenne Kid, a soft-spoken cowboy who eschews guns in favor of a trusty bullwhip.

            In the film, the Kid is called upon to rescue an old miner and former partner, Fuzzy, who has been kidnapped for the deed to his mine.  Lash and his team-which includes Wild Bill Hickock and Tommy and Lizzy, Fuzzy's nephew and niece-are soon hot on the trail of the bad guys.

            Return of The Cheyenne Kid is entertaining and funny, and positive lessons (fools rush in, don't judge by appearances, separate fact from fiction, etc.) for youngsters abound.

            "I have children myself and it's nice to be able to show them what I've been up to," says 27-year old Stewart.

            Stewart has been making movies since about 1990, first short films and then longer features through Virginia Tech Television.  He got the gig through contacts at the Blacksburg university.  He calls that period his "film school."

            In 2001, Stewart showed his first feature the thriller Concealment (which was also shot in Charlottesville) at a film festival, where he met Toney, who was working on a feature of his own at the time.  Toney liked what he saw in Stewart's film, and half a year later he contacted him to ask if Stewart would be interested in collaborating on "this new kids western he'd been working on."

            Stewart, who directed Return, and Toney, who wrote and produced it, shot the film on a shoestring budget during 10 days in May on location in Buckingham County.  Most of the cast and crew came from Tom Mix Rangers of Virginia, Western re-enactors whose group is headed by Toney's father.  The Tom Mix Rangers also provided the costumes, sets and horses.

            Stewart, like many independent filmmakers "knows how to make every dollar count," he says, and was able to keep the production cheap (it helped that everyone involved worked for meals only).  Though he calls it "an easy shoot," it was not without its challenges-the actors, most of them new to filmmaking, had some butterflies to get over.

            "Getting them to relax in front of the camera took some doing," he says.  "But what's funny is that by the time the shooting was finished I noticed how everyone had improved a great deal."  Which, he adds, is "just what we need for Episode Two."

            At the moment, Stewart says, he and Toney are packaging Return of the Cheyenne Kid for distributors and "finding ways to show it to the world with hopes to find funding for future episodes."  As an actor, Stewart is also involved in two other independent films  now are in production.  He is currently working on another feature, Containment, a sci-fi thriller to be shot in Charlottesville.

            "With it I will combine the best of everything that I have learned in independent filmmaking," Stewart says.  "And see where it goes."

            Happy trails, indeed.-Paul Henderson